A University of Exeter study found that adding plants to a workspace can raise productivity by up to 15%. NASA’s Clean Air Study showed certain indoor plants pull benzene, formaldehyde, and trichloroethylene out of enclosed rooms. For anyone working from home, one or two pots near the desk improves air quality without adding another chore. The ten plants below handle low light, irregular watering, and tight desk space. Why the Best Plants for Home Office Need to Survive Neglect? ...

Many people claim that AI inference is unprofitable to serve, and thus must be subsidized by an ocean of dumb money from investors who believe that some future AI model will come to dominate the world economy. When that dumb money goes away, so will AI products. According to this view, LLMs are just inherently too expensive (in terms of money, power, and water) to be used in consumer products. In fact, they can only be used today by externalizing the costs: money onto VC funds and now retail E...

I wrote the following piece for IFP’s Transit Abundance Playbook , a collection of 15 ideas to improve transit delivery in the US. American transit costs and timelines are substantially higher than those of other developed countries: Spain builds tunneled subway for ~$200 million per mile, while New York spends billions; China built an entire network of high-speed rail while California was failing to connect Bakersfield to Merced. This playbook draws on the past decade of research into the ca...

Shall I end this life a pauper? If AI can do all work at human level or better, what stops corporations replacing us all with AI? This is the permanent underclass meme. The idea is: within a few years, all white collar work will be automated by AI, at which point there is no social mobility. The main way people cope is, they tell themselves: if I work hard, accumulate capital, maybe join one of the big AI labs, I might secure my place in the future. I want to argue this is a fantastically sho...

While I decide what to do with PEP 832 after polling folks on their opinion , I thought I would write out why I'm even bothering with any of this. I'm going to talk from the perspective of VS Code and its Python extensions , but you could just as easily substitute "VS Code" for your editor of choice or even "AI agent" and it wouldn't change the problem: it isn't necessarily easy for tools like VS Code to know what workflow (tool) you're using and thus where you're putting your (virtual) env...

I have to publish this now, we’re already halfway through W26. Current situation: JUST KIDDING I am actually inside staring at a computer instead of lying on my back in a meadow staring up at the sky. But I did see these nice clouds earlier today.  Monday 08 June: The U of Ark college visit. Zeke really likes it and they have a great engineering program. It poured down rain all morning. I bought umbrellas in the gift shop. I am bad at selfies.  ...

I have a new graphics card for my primary desktop, the Sapphire Nitro+ AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT . This replaces my Zotac GeForce RTX 3070 Twin Edge , a card with a name that’s almost as long. The tl;dr is: it’s great, for me! This isn’t going to be a technical post laden with benchmarks; there are plenty of more qualified people you can read and watch for those. Instead, this is more of a thinking-out-loud post about the upgrade process, and how one random person with their own specif...

By Zhuoning Yuan , Ta-Ying Cheng , Benjamin Klein , Bahareh Azarnoush Introduction At Netflix, we build technology to help storytellers bring their creative visions to life and to help members discover the stories they love. To connect stories with diverse audiences around the world, we produce promotional assets, including trailers, teasers, and social short‑form videos, that build on and elevate the original footage. Through close collaboration with the teams crafting these assets, we i...

This is a quick post, mostly for my own reference. I've avoided LUTs and 'Log' video footage for years 1 , mostly because of the extra tiny bit of workflow involved. Like RAW photos, 'Log' footage retains the video sensor's full dynamic range, so you can pull more color and luminance information out of the footage later. But unlike photography, where RAW has been a thing for decades, and many workflows 'just work' without me having to 'grade' every individual photo, in video precious few con...

You want to face your fears, but they're hard to find. Fears feast on uncertainty, and the unknown is slippery. You cannot know the unknowable, nor evade the inevitable. Uncertainty forever lurks in your periphery. To study a fear is to steal its power. You cannot destroy uncertainties, but you can tame them with labels, measures, and deductions. One way to tame the unknown: experiment with its knobs. Your natural curiosity will lead you to countless knobs, most of which will be incorrect/...

What links certain mathematical models of traffic flow, shallow-water waves, and quantum particle scattering? The surprising answer lies in a corner of the algebraic combinatorics world that goes by the name of positive Grassmannian. In simple terms, the positive Grassmannian is a shape that classifies other shapes. Remarkably, pieces of the positive Grassmannian can be reassembled in forms that… Source What links certain mathematical models of traffic flow, shallow-water waves, and quantum...

Content warning: This poem is about the ongoing heat in Europe. I strike an optimistic tone toward the end, but if you would prefer not to read about the heat, I offer you one of the Scottish poems I have written in stead . Nature’s weary tears fill the air; invisible, warming. Relentlessly, days proceed. Hours pass; Celsius rises. Midnights: warm like day. We stay inside. Blinds closed, water glasses full, cookers off. Flowers bloom early. Eyelids weigh; we yearn for rest that does not come....

I’ve been unemployed for eight months now, and haven’t written as much as I thought I would. Middle-aged angst is one reason, but another is the realization that most of the projects I was thinking of doing are solving yesterday’s problems. I have a long history of doing this: The JavaScript and Python versions of Software Design by Example are the books I needed in the 2000s when I was teaching undergraduate courses at the University of Toronto. I’m proud...

In this post we’re going to see how share.acquire.mode=record_limit combined with: fewer consumers than partitions and various cases of “partition skew” …can result in subpar performance with share groups.  I stumbled on these issues when running large sets of dimensional tests with Dimster’s explore-limits mode, which finds the highest sustainable throughput while staying within a target end-to-end latency target. There was a specific subset of the tests that explore-limits mode wo...

Exploring how compilers lower ordinary loops into explicit data-parallel kernels. Exploring how compilers lower ordinary loops into explicit data-parallel kernels.

I don’t prompt Claude anymore. I have loops running that prompt Claude and figuring out what to do. My job is to write loops. — Boris Cherny Over the last months I have watched more and more people build something on top of coding agents that feels meaningfully different from just using a coding agent. Some of this happens on top of Pi which is cool to see for sure! The pattern is the same everywhere though: work is put into a queue of sorts, a machine picks it up, attempts it, sto...

Hello, we hope your week has been pleasant. 2.1 Experimental This week we released the 2.1 experimental. You can read the full changelog on our Forum . Funnily enough, the changelog was too long to post on Reddit, as the limit is 40,000 characters... oops :). Click to view full resolution You can opt in to experimental now, and there are some things to bear in mind: You get all the 2.1 changes today. 2.0 save games will load, but ...

When most people think of the Coast Guard, they probably imagine daring rescues like you see in the movies—hopefully helicopters flying through hurricanes, like in  The Perfect Storm , though for many people, it’s probably just the five seconds we appear in  Top Gun . While it may be the “forgotten service” from time to time, the Coast Guard punches far above its weight class. Beyond search and rescue missions, there is another side of the Coast Guard focused on facilitating globa...

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Anne Lee Steele, whose blog can be found at aleesteele.com . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . People and Blogs is supported by the "One a Month" club members. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself? I’m Anne. I’ve spent almost a decade in...

In the hours following the release of CVE-2026-8461 for the project FFmpeg , site reliability workers and systems administrators scrambled to desperately rebuild and patch all their systems to fix an out-of-bounds write in the MagicYUV decoder (libavcodec/magicyuv.c) caused by improper bounds checking, resulting in heap corruption, denial of service, and potential remote code execution when processing a specially crafted video file. This is due to the affected components being ...

0.0 Context Setting Wednesday, June 24 2026 in Portland, Oregon where the high today is 86f/30c and the high in the U.K. was 97f/36.1c, and yesterday 40 drowning deaths were reported in France over the past week 1 . So it’s time to re-read Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, or rather the book’s first chapter. Which I intend to never read again anyway, for the right reasons. Events are on hiatus until I get scheduling sorted out. In the meantime, let’s get on with ...

When you start thinking deeply about a mathematics problem you may enter the "zone", a period of intense focus where you think solely about the problem and potential solutions, and more importantly block out all other thoughts and even lose track of time. Mathematicians don't own the zone, actors, musicians, athletes and many others have their own version of the zone. But for math, when working on an open problem, you have no idea how difficult a solution may be, or if a solution exists at all. ...

Scaling laws are one of the most critical empirical findings in deep learning. The observation is simple in form: the training loss $L$ decreases predictably as we scale up model size $N$, dataset size $D$, and compute $C$, following a power-law curve, which appears as a straight line on a log-log plot. We can view scaling laws as a framework for describing the relationship between compute, loss, model size and data; at its core, it is about how to allocate precious compute optimally between $N$...